butter. I keep seeing pictures flash by. And it’s a shitty movie.
“Good thing they don’t have a lot of time to waste on me.
“But how much? A minute? Three? How long could it take?
“Just do it quickly. A bullet to the head.
“No, not the head.
“Then where?
“Okay, come on already. Come on, you sons of bitches! Fucking Egyptians—sideways-walkers!”
He yelled as loudly as he could. Then Ilan heard two ringing blows and figured Avram had slapped himself.
“Ilan,” Avram said suddenly in a voice so close and tender that it sounded like a casual phone call, “you’ll probably marry Ora in the end. Way to go, you stud. Just promise me you’ll name your son Avram, d’you hear me? But with the ‘h’—Avraham! Father of many nations! And tell him about me. I’m warning you, Ilan, if you don’t, my ghost will haunt you at night in your bed and bruise your reed.”
Then he laughed. “Listen to this! Once, before the army, I went to Ora’s house in Haifa, and her mom made me take my shoes off, you know her, but my socks were so stinky, I hadn’t changed them for maybe a week, you know me, and she sat me down in the living room, on the fauteuil, to find out who I was and what I was plotting to do with her daughter, and I was so nervous about my socks that I started telling her that when I was seventeen I’d decided to be a Stoic, and then I was an Epicurean for a while, and now I’d been a Skeptic for a few months. I gave her a whole speech so she wouldn’t notice the stench. Just a silly story. But tell it to Ora, and to the boy, to Avraham, and you can all laugh about it, why not.
“Enough,” he pleaded. “Come on, come on, whoever you are.”
“Seven notebooks, Ora—d’you get that? It was a fantastic idea. Listen, I was thinking of a series, not just one play. Three at least. One hour each. And no compromises. For once, I was going to do something huge, something like our old friend Orson’s War of the Worlds. The end of the world, I was thinking. That’s the idea, see? But not because of an alien invasion or an atom bomb. I was thinking about a meteor strike, and everyone knows exactly when it’s going to happen. ’Cause the whole idea is that the end date is known, see? Every person in the world knows exactly when—
“It kills me that I can’t tell you this. How am I going to write something without getting your confirmation, without your enthusiasm? Listen, listen, listen to me,” he talked on, but his breath was heavy.
Whenever he described a new idea to Ora or Ilan, Avram was a bundle of excitement. The heat radiated from him. Ilan tried to imagine him in his underground hovel, moving his hands and legs excitedly.
“And all of humanity knows that exactly on such and such date they will be destroyed. Not a single living thing will survive, not even animals or plants. No one gets off the hook, no exception committees, no board decisions. All of life will evaporate.
“Seven notebooks those fuckers burned!” he shouted again with sincere astonishment. “How could they screw me like that?
“Listen, the clocks will only show the time left until the evaporation. And when someone asks what time it is, it’ll only have one meaning: How long left until—
“Get it? Wait, there’s more.”
Ilan ran his tongue over his lips. Avram’s excitement had begun to infect him. He could see Avram’s inner light, which made him almost beautiful.
“For example, the museums will take their pictures and statues out of the galleries and warehouses. All the works of art. Everything will be out on the streets. Just think, Venus de Milo and Guernica leaning on a fence outside a plain old house in Tel Aviv, or Ashkelon, or Tokyo. All the streets will be full of art and everything people have ever painted or sculpted or created. The great masters, alongside grannies from the art class at the Givatayim community center. Nahum Gutman and Renoir and Zaritsky and Gauguin, next to drawings by kindergarten kids. There’ll be pictures and sculptures everywhere, clay, iron, plasticine, stone. Millions of art works of every kind, from every age, from ancient Egypt and the Incas and India and the Renaissance, all out on the streets. Try to see it, try to see it for me. In the squares,